Comment Email Responder

Description

The Comment Email Responder v2 is based on the work of Andrew Flusche who can up with the original concept and wrote the first iteration of this plugin. It’s purpose is to provide an easy mechanism for a blog administrator to email a response to one of the comments placed on the website. The response becomes a comment in the normal way, but also fires off an email to the commentor with the content of the response and his original comment.

Installation

1. Download the plugin file, unzip and place it in your plugin folder.
This makes the plugin available to WordPress and it should now appear in your Plugin folder. The zip file also includes an icon for the plugin which should also be placed in the plugin folder.

2. Activate the plugin
This “starts up” the plugin. At this point, the plugin is active, but won’t work correctly till it is configured

3. Configure the plugin
The plugin can be configured both from a new panel in the Options menu called Comment Email Responder. Please go to this panel and supply the required information.

Usage

Once the plugin has been activated you’ll notice a new icon appearing next to commenter names on your posts. Click on this icon to respond to the comment. When you save the comment, a copy will be emailed to the person who left the comment.

Download

comment-email-responder

Comments/Bugs

  • The plugin behaves well with the Subscribe-to-comments plugin and won’t email someone who’s already subscribed to the comment thread.
  • The plugin assumes the existence of the “comment_form” action which is optional for template creators. If this is missing in your template, please add it accordingly.
  • The plugin assumes that your admin user is set to wp_user_level 10. While this is true in most cases, some WordPress installations mess this up. If the plugin doesn’t seem to work, check out the fix on Cynthia’s blog.

Screenshot

Here’s the plugin in action:

History

v1.0: Base release. Implementation by Andrew Flusche

v2.0: New version. Admin interface added and automatic insertion into template on activation

v2.1: Minor bug fixes

v2.21: Another couple of minor bug fixes

v2.3: Email now contains link to post together with a specified footer

v2.4: Fixes by Steven Ross from Bustspammers, a site about fighting spam.

Websites using this plugin

I love it when people use my work, so if you do, drop me a comment. I’d love to pop around and have a look at your blog.

266 comments

  1. Ha. So you can just ignore my last comment. Because I was, in fact, doing something wrong.

    I still had the BTC comments.php file loaded for my theme, instead of the default. So it wasn’t *your* plugin that hated me, it was my own inability to remove all customized files. *facepalm*

    So, yay! I love this plugin, thank you so much, the only way I would love it more is if it did work with threaded comments, but I will be PATIENT and love it lots anyway. 😀

  2. *chuckle* was just writing a reply when I noticed you posted a follow-up comment.

    I need to spend some time looking at BTC to see how to get the plugin working with it, but if it needs modifications to the BTC comments.php, this might be too difficult for most people.

    WP provides a number of extension points, it’s best for plugin authors to use these rather than providing customised theme files that may or may not work with particular themes.

  3. Please tell me how you fixed the problem that the icon appears but does not work, I have subscription pluggin , and this envelope icon is un-clickable an error in .. javascript: RespondToComment(2252) I have level 10.

  5. Can you also make something that you can see the quoted tekst in your comment… that would be so great, because i’m looking for this for a long time…
    and also something, that you can choose yourself were you want the quote icon to be placed… because now i see the icon in the “Last comments” in the sidebar…

  6. It’s not working on WP 2.3. I have a standard theme, checked everything on levels, comment_form, but still not sending email (but all the emails from that server or other services at WP are working fine).

    Thanks for your help, and this great plugin (I know I’ll love it when it works)

  7. This is a great plugin. I’m just wondering if you can make this plugin support HTML and make an option to reply to multiple comments.

  9. hello!

    i installed this to my blog but i couldn’t get it to work. I don’t see any envelope. All I see is

    name of the commentor “Comment Email Responder” Says:

    -No icon at all…

    Please help me get this to work on my blog…

    Thank you!

  10. hello owen

    now i can see the envelope icon but i cannot click on it. I have checked my header and comments section and they both have the necessary php codes… I also have a user level of 10… I don’t know what else to do…. Please help me… Thanks

  11. Thanks a lot for this plugin! I thought it wouldn’t work. But after configuring in the Options menu, problem’s gone. Cheers to Owen and Andrew!

  14. Hi!

    I’ve used and loved your plugin for a while now! However i converted my wp database from latin1 to utf-8 yesterday and now when using your plugin, the ? ? and ? in the swedish language turns to funny looking characters. Is there anything I can add to the plugin in order to send the encoding correctly?

    TIA!

  15. Hi! Nice plugin!

    But, sometimes, I receive HTTP 500 pages when I use it. Although I don’t ever receive them when I post without this plugin.

    Can you suggest some action to avoid these errors when using your plugin?

  16. Hi Owen,
    I use this plugin on sewingmom.com and it works great thanks to you! I”ve just installed it on my new site and I have the envelope icon but nothing happens when I click it. I have read through all these comments and checked everything I knew how to check. The only thing I don’t can’t figure out is if my admin is user level 10. Any suggestions?

  25. Hi owen. Love your plug-in but I am finding there is some sort of issues either with 2.3.2 or other plug-ins that I have ( WP polls and ajax edit comments.) I don’t know if it is “js” issue or not. When your plug-in is installed with the rest I can’t get past post.php when I try and save. I have to load a billion times.

  26. Owen,

    I want to love this plugin. 🙂

    However, both the envelope image and the envelope function do not work for me. I’ve tried using this in conjunction with (and without) Better Comments Manager & Brian’s Threaded Comments. Same results. Suggestions are welcome, I think it’s a great plugin & hope to use it!

  27. Very handy plugin! Friends and I wondered for a long time as to how we could email and respond in a blog post in one step –Comment Email Responder works nicely.

    Oddly, I cannot remember how I found your plugin (Google, perhaps?) –have you considered submitting it to the WordPress plugin repository? (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/) It’d be great to make this tool more known amongst WordPress users.

    Btw, really like the header image of the Lakes District. Went there this past autumn. Lovely walks!

  28. I’ve been using this plugin for a wee while now and I think it’s absolutely BRILLIANT. It always used to be such a pain emailing commenters back before – it was double the work because you had to write a reply comment on your own site, then copy and paste the same comment into an email and send it to the commenter. LOVE it – thank you so much!

  29. Hi! I was using this plugin just fine until someone told me that IE couldn’t open the webpage: abort abort blah blah blah…

    I think it’s the use of innerHTML in the javascript. Anyone else run into this?

  30. Hmm, no longer seems to work with WP 2.5. The icon doesn’t appear, and so therefore I can’t actually do what this plugin is for.

    I don’t suppose you would know what the problem would be?

    (Sorry no link – revamping my site).

  31. It seems to work fine for me with WP 2.5. 🙂

    Great plugin so far, looking forward to seeing how this works out for me. Thanks!

  32. This is half for Owen, half for anyone that may be doubting the plugin.

    Firstly, I’ve had a never ending streak of problems with WP 2.5. There were too many variables to quickly see which one was causing the issues.

    Secondly, and actually this is the most important part: this plugin works fine (perfectly!) with 2.5. There are no compatibility issues at all.

    Making a very long and frustrating story short, updating my domain to PHP 5.2.x from 4.4.x fixed everything.

    Considering WP doesn’t require this version of PHP, and I’ve used WP 2.3.3 and this plugin with 4.4.x successfully, I can’t begin to understand what happened!

    But, I’m happy things are now sorted, and working as they should be, so I’m not going to go poking for answers.

    To all prospective users of this plugin: USE IT! It’s incredible! Honestly!

    I think that’s all the important points covered. 😉

  33. @Emz: Thanks for letting us know. Glad you managed to get it sorted out in the end!

  34. Hi, I don’t understand how this plugin is supposed to work or your instructions …

    On my blog, an envelop shows up for some commenters, but not for others.

    But most of all, I have no idea what the envelopes are supposed to do/what I’m supposed to do with the envelopes.

    Could you maybe give some more detailed installation and usage instructions? I never knew that this envelop icon had anything to do with your plugin at all until I read through all of the comments in this thread!

  35. Actually, I just checked again … my comments.php has the comment_form action, my user level as admin is set to 10. But the png that is supposed to show up doesn’t show up at all. 🙁

    I’m using Brian’s Threaded Comments – is it possible that your plugin doesn’t work if that plugin is installed?

    And if so, is there anyway to get it to work?

    I’d really like to have my commenters notified of their comments …

  36. @Juno: Can you try turning off the other plugin temporarily to see if it makes any difference ?

  37. @Juno: Brian’s Threaded Comments already notify the commenter about the reply. It was the first plugin I knew that did that. Unfortunately, it does not work with TinyMCEcomments and Firefox (my case). So, I switched to Comment Email Responder 😉

    @Owen: I use your plugin under WP 2.5 and it does work fine. Thanks! But, is there a way to make it work with Better Comments Manager?

  38. As a note, it is best-practice to not trust inputs from form fields because it is easy enough to edit a form manually. {edited}

    {editor: thanks .. point taken}

  40. I love this a lot, but was wondering….

    Do you ever think that it will be updated to post the comment replies within the commentors reply?

    Say after my comment here, you comment me, and it is immediately below my text, within my comment area and not four or five comments below mine.

    Is this something that is doable?

    Just wondering 🙂

    Thank you!

  42. @Gina: Thanks for the suggestion. It’s a great idea, but there are some other features I need to introduce first.

    I’ll leave your comment as a reminder though

  43. I am AMAZED by people like you! I am new to the blogging game (as you can see by my lonely little blog) and am trying to learn as much as I can. I’m a “traditional” print writer who has just published a book, so I feel like my brain can’t even begin to absorb all the new vocabulary I’m learning.

    Thanks for lending us all your brains!

  44. @Katrin: Thanks for the comment. Well, this is a hobby for me. I find it great fun to learn new things and use them constructively, so really it is no effort.

  46. “The plugin behaves well with the Subscribe-to-comments plugin and won’t email someone who’s already subscribed to the comment thread.”

    It is sending double emails to those who’ve subscribed to comments.

    On my blog as well as another.

    And I’m running 2.5

    Any suggestions? I’d really love to keep this plugin.

  49. I upgraded to WP 2.5 and tried the plugin again. Now it works like a charm. No idea why, but I’m very happy and I expect my commenters will be, too! 🙂

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